Eli5 is the broadband connection same as mobile internet (lte 4g 5g)?
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More or less, yes.
In a house, maybe a wire connects you to some piece of equipment that connects to your ISP. From that point on, everything is “the internet”. The only difference with mobile devices is they are wirelessly connected to towers that connect to other machines that connect to “the internet.”.
So the main difference is just the first few steps of the way. Some bickering could be done because “broadband” doesn’t have an official definition so you could pick a definition where 4G isn’t fast enough, but that’s overcomplicating things. In the spirit of this question, I’m assuming “broadband” just means “fast internet” and 4G is pretty fast to most people.
Broadband is just an umbrella term for fast-access internet. Back in the day, anything better than dial-up was referred to as broadband. We’re talking 56K+ here. So you can imagine that nearly every internet access nowadays could fall into that category.
In that sense, you can always categorize mobile internet as broadband. It’s more useful to speak in terms of the actual technology used (GSM/LTE/CDMA for mobile internet, which get simplified to 3G/4G etc).
Your home connection, assuming we’re talking about Wi-Fi, uses higher frequency signals than cellular connection.
Speed-wise, cellular connections are getting faster than home connections because they’re transitioning to higher frequency signals that carry more data.
The higher the frequency, the less distance signals can travel. That’s why your home connection can’t extend far and also why cell companies are installing more and more antennas to get their high frequency signal closer to you.
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